Dalton knelt on the quilt, uncaring that he was dripping water everywhere. “But you still do it.” He hummed a little, but decided he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Lydia said she packed sandwiches.”
I tried not to watch his movements, nor the way his muscly arms stretched. “We packed cans of soda if you want one.”
“What kind?”
“Sprite and orange pop.”
Dalton broke into our cooler, swiping up an orange pop and cracking the tab. He took a long drink, let out a loudahhhh, and sat back on his heels. “You all done swimming?”
He was asking probably because I had my cover-up back on. “I think so. You?”
“For now.”
I turned back to my drawing, but the hand that held my pencil had gone numb. Ivy’s body was only half-finished. She was missing her arms, and I stared at the spaces they should be as if they’d magically appear. Being alone with Dalton now was kind of similar to how it’d been last night—there was pressure to not slip up.
I succeeded last night. I could succeed today, too.
“So, how long has it been?” He shifted so he sat cross-legged in front of me. “Since you and Jamie have been trying things out, or however you said it.”
With his focus entirely on me, I struggled to remember the agreed-upon backstory. Eight in the morning felt like forever ago, and the sun mixing with Dalton’s probing stare left my mind hazy. “He—he asked me out after prom.”
“After? Not before?”
“He said… how beautiful I looked in my dress gave him the courage to finally ask me out.”
“Let’s go with prom,” Jamie had said this morning in my kitchen. “We’ll say prom was when I realized. When I saw how beautiful Daisy was in her dress.”
Which had been a lie—the part about the dress. I’d ordered it online, and it was supposed to have been a deep emerald strapless gown with rhinestones, but came more like a puke green with glued-on sequins. But a believable enough story to keep people from second-guessing it.
Or, at least, that’d been the plan. “He saw you in a dress and fell in love?” Dalton sounded unimpressed. “That’s his story?”
“You didn’t notice me until I wore a dress to the spring formal my sophomore year,” I muttered, pencil digging too forcefully into my page. It looked like I’d given Ivy a scar down her arm. “Men are simple, I guess.”
“For the record.” A shadow fell over our blankets, and Jamie quickly sat down beside me. He held two corndog sticks between his fingers, offering the one drenched in mustard to me. A corndog I was technically supposed to buy, since I’d lost our race, but he’d refused to let me hand him money. “I’ve been in love with Daisy since Nell and I switched schools freshman year.”
I froze, thankful Jamie still had a good grip on the corn dog stick, because my fingers went lax. What theheck? That line hadn’t been part of our story this morning. We hadn’t rehearsed that. What was he doing, going off-script?
“It was prom that I realized going the rest of my life without saying something would be impossible,” Jamie went on, speaking easily as if he were truly recalling. “Butit wasn’t because of some dress. It was because I’d been accepted.”
Dalton stared at Jamie, like he was trying to suss out a lie. “Accepted?”
“To NYU.” Jamie pulled his hand back, and the corndog in my grip wobbled violently before I had the strength to pinch it tighter. “When we checked our portals for our admission, that’s when I thought it.”
Jamie spoke so nonchalantly, as if his words didn’t transport me back to the time everything fell apart.
It’d been the first of April when NYU had posted our admission status in their online portal. We’d gone straight to my house after school to check together, in private. Nellie had already applied Early Decision to Mullhound—and had gotten in—so she’d been there as moral support. Theo had stood beside Jamie’s chair, his little hands curled around the spindles.
“On three,” Nellie had breathed, eyes darting between her brother and me.
I hadn’t been that nervous going into it. My dream had always been NYU. Of course I’d be accepted. “One.”
“Two,” she had said.
And then Jamie had finished. “Three.”
“Go!” Theo called as I slammed theLog Inbutton.
The world had become a blacked-out blur as the webpage loaded, my pulse the only sound I could hear. The webpage loaded slowly, and I’d taken a page from Nellie’s book and spelled out one word I surely had been about to read.A-C-C-E-P-T-E?—
